Desktop/Laptop

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Elkhart Lake shows up on Compact Type 6

  The VCOM-1600 is available with Linux or Windows 10, as well as optional VHub AI Developer, VHub ROS, and VHub EtherCAT software. Two Atom x6000 SKUs are featured. The first is the quad-core Atom x6425RE, which is required to use the VCOM-1600’s touted Intel TCC and TSN network synchronization support. The RE SoCs also provide functional safety (FuSa) features, which are not listed by Vecow. A mainstream, dual-core Atom x6211E is also available.

• Medevel ☛ 16 Free, Open-source Clipboard managers for Windows, macOS, and Linux

  The system clipboard is a buffer background system service that offers a short-term storage for text and data transfer between running programs.

  The clipboard manager app is a software to extends the system clipboard service functionalities.

• Why is Linux so popular ? [Ed: Poor article that calls GNU "Linux"]

  Linux was created by Linus Torvalds. He made this operating system available for free.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ The Simplest File Manager You’ll Ever Find! – Invidious

  Are you looking for a simple file manager, a file manager so simple you might call it sfm or the simple file manager well you’re in luck and as you may guess from that name it’s also a suckless inspired application

• Video ☛ Want To Run A Script? Remember The Dot Slash (./) ! – Invidious

  In today’s short video, I simply wanted to address a common new-to-Linux question regarding the execution of scripts. That question is: why do we need the dot-slash (./) before the script name?

• Linux Switchers Live Stream (Spring 2022)

• Video ☛ Linux Lite 5.8 Quick overview #Shorts – Invidious

  A Quick overview of Linux Lite 5.8.

• Destination Linux 268: Free As In Freedom Not Free As In Beer

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be discussing the phrase of “Free As In Freedom, Not Free As In Beer”. Is it okay for developers to charge for their work? Then we’re going to take a look at a new partnership Canonical has with Vodafone. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• LHS Episode #456: The Weekender LXXXVII

  It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

• LHS Episode #455: Rocket

  Hello and welcome to the 455th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss the inevitable topic of the invasion of Ukraine and how amateur radio is related. Also discussed are the upcoming YOTA camp for 2022, the Steam Deck, the Github Advisory Database, a new release of FreeDV and much more. Thank you for listening and have a great week. Our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine. Stay safe out there and stay strong.

• LHS Episode #454: Bottles Deep Dive

  Hello and welcome to the 454th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss a project called Bottles, born of a concept from CrossOver Linux, which creates a quasi virtualization and containerization platform for running Windows applications under Linux. The discussion ranges from theory to installation and implementation and configuration. We hope you enjoy this episode and that it’s informational as well. Have a great week.

• LHS Episode #453: The Weekender LXXXVI

  It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

• LHS Episode #452: A Bit O’ Blarney

  Hello and welcome to the 452nd installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss ARRL grants, FreeDV Activity Day, the demise of TenTec, new WINE, new Ubuntu, IMs via ham radio and much more. Thank you for listening and have a great week.

Kernel Space

• HowTo Geek ☛ Why Is the Linux Mascot a Penguin?

  If you’re a fan of Linux, you might have seen “Tux,” the friendly penguin mascot for the operating system. But why a penguin, and why Tux? We’ll explore the history behind the semi-aquatic bird mascot with a little help from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux himself.

  Linus Torvalds Loves Penguins

  Unlike commercial operating systems backed by many million-dollar marketing campaigns, early versions of Linux didn’t have any formal branding. Linux started as a hobbyist project by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds in 1991, and a group of volunteers around the world developed and maintained it in its early years. So when developing Linux’s public image, its developers went about it in a very informal way: by discussing it on the Linux-Kernel group email list.

• LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 5.17-rc7

  Linus has released 5.17-rc7, which is hopefully the final prepatch in this development series: “as things stand, I expect that final 5.17 will be next weekend unless something surprising comes up”.

Applications

• 9to5Linux ☛ VLC 3.0.17 Improves HW Decoding for AMD GPUs, Adds Support for DTS LBR and DAV Files

  VLC 3.0.17 is here about nine months after VLC 3.0.16 to introduce several new features, including support for the DTS-HD LBR (Low Bit Rate) decoder, support for the new FOURCC for the AV1, E-AC3, and GeoVision decoders, support for DAV video files, WebP image mapping, as well as support for uncompressed audio in MP4 files (ISO/IEC 23003-5).

  This release also brings numerous improvements, such as better hardware decoding for some AMD GPU drivers, improved playback of live AV1 streams, improved support for VP9 streams, improved AudioCD support (audio/data mixed mode, MusicBrainz), improved support for subtitles using the tx3g codec in MP4 tracks, improved HTTP2 memory usage, as well as improved AVCapture and SRT modules.

• Make Use Of ☛ The 15 Best Educational Linux Apps for Students

  
  As a student, it can be hard for you to buy proprietary apps for your study needs. On Linux, you can download several educational apps for free.

  It can be difficult to afford costly educational software as a student. And that’s where Linux excels—its open-source concept is of great help to students, offering many helpful yet free-of-cost educational apps to aid in their learning.

  So, let’s look at some of the most useful educational apps for students available on Linux for free.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Install AWS CLI on Linux Mint 20

  Since the Linux users feel more comfortable while working with the command line interfaces, that is why the Amazon Web Services have introduced the AWS CLI to manage all these services via a single platform. This tool enables you to manage multiple services at a time with all the more ease and convenience. In this guide, we will teach you the installation procedure of the AWS CLI on a Linux Mint 20 system.

• Trend Oceans ☛ Bash Keyboard Shortcuts for the pro! – TREND OCEANS

  Typically, we use arrow keys to control shell behaviors like moving the cursor from one point to another point. Also, it’s quite common to make mistakes while writing commands and to correct these you may use arrow keys + backspace, which is not optimal at all.

  In the bash terminal, you can use several keystrokes to control the shell features that you are going to see.

• OSNote ☛ How to Write and Run a C Program on Ubuntu – OSNote

  C language is one of the earliest programming languages. It is simple and easy to learn. Formerly C programming was performed on Turbo C, a discontinued integrated development environment. But nowadays it can be easily executed on different operating systems.

  In this guide, you will learn how to write your first C program using the Linux operating system which requires a GNU C compiler instead of an integrated environment. The following steps will show to install a GNU C compiler on Linux, how to write the source code, compile and execute the C program.

• How to use Spring Boot with MongoDB | FOSS Linux

  Spring Boot is a Java-based open-source framework for creating microservices, which allows developers to deploy and develop services independently. Each service running has its process, thereby achieving the lightweight model that supports business applications. Microservices have several advantages: simple scalability, minimum configuration, lesser production time, container compatibility, and easy development.

  Spring boot provides a good platform for developers to build stand-alone and production-ready spring applications that you can just run; thus, one can get started with minimum configurations without needing an entire spring configuration setup.

  For instance, handling dependency management is complex for big projects; Spring Boot thus resolves this difficulty by providing a set of dependencies for the developer’s convenience. The Spring Boot application scans all the beans and package declarations when the application initializes; Besides, the Spring Boot application annotation includes component scan, Auto-Configuration, and Spring Boot Configuration.

• Vitux ☛ How to use LXD Containers on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

  Linux container virtualization (LXD) is similar to Virtual machines (e.g. KVM) but with more speed, efficiency and much lighter compared to virtual machines. LXD containers for OS like Ubuntu, Centos, Arch Linux, etc are easy to create. LXD uses the same Linux kernel which reduces the overhead of the addition of such kernels.

  In this article, we will show the installation and configuration process of LXD on Ubuntu 20.04 server. Also, we will explain how to start an LXD container and how to run commands inside the container.

• How to install XFCE Desktop on Debian 11 | FOSS Linux

  Debian 11 provides so many options for choosing a desktop environment. One of the many great desktop options is Xfce which is light, simple, fast, and a very resource-friendly DE that works very well in almost any system.

  Whether you have already installed the default GNOME desktop that comes with Debian and would like to experience Xfce while keeping the GNOME DE or install Debian 11 along with Xfce, we will show you both the methods in this article today.

  There are so many use cases for installing Xfce DE on Debian 11. You can do a fair bit of customization to your liking and run so many utilities. The desktop is intuitive and highly resource-friendly. You can run it quite well on old hardware, and due to that reason, you can utilize any old PC lying around and set it up and running with the help of this desktop.

• How to install Wireshark on Debian 11 Buster | FOSS Linux

  Wireshark is a free and well-known network communication link analyzer formerly known as Ethereal. It presents captured packet data in as much detail as possible. You can contemplate a network packet analyzer as a measuring gadget for cross-examining what is happening inside a network cable, just like an electrician utilizes a voltmeter to check what is inside an electric cable.

  Sometime back, Wireshark and look-alike tools were either expensive, proprietary, or both. Nevertheless, the dawn of Wireshark has enormously changed to the point that it is now available for free, open-source, and it has proven to be one of the best packet analyzers available in the market today.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Store Docker Container Data In Docker Volumes

  One option for automating a container with data is to store the data within the container image. However, this requires a copy of the data to be in each container you run, which can lead to wasted resources if the containers are scaled up. A better option is to store one copy of the data in a Docker volume and then share that volume between containers.

  You can think of a Docker volume as a folder that exists outside of the container filesystem but is still accessible by the containers running on the same host. When you create a new container, you can either mount an existing volume or create a new one. If you create a new volume, Docker will automatically create a new storage layer on the underlying host filesystem and initialize it with the data you specify.

  Once you have created a volume, you can use it to store any type of data, including static files, application data, or logs. You can also use volumes to share data between containers.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Etherpad on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Etherpad on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Etherpad is written in Node.js and supports thousands of simultaneous real-time users. Etherpad is a highly customizable editor with the support of various plugins. And also supports modern document formats such as doc, pdf, and many more.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Etherpad on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How To Install Kodi 19.4 In Ubuntu 20.04 / LinuxMint | Tips On UNIX

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install KODI 19.4 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 18.04, and LinuxMint 20.3.

  KODI formerly known as XBMC Media center is a free and open-source cross-platform software media player. It is managed by a non-profit XBMC foundation and developed by volunteers around the world.

  It is now officially available for Android, BSD, Linux,macOS, and Windows operating systems. The latest version of KODI is 19.4 and comes with bug fixes and new features.

• Create And Manage Disk Partitions With Parted In Linux – OSTechNix

  There are many utilities, such as fdisk, cdisk, exists to partition the hard drive in Linux and Unix-like systems. In this article, we will focus on how to use the parted utility to create a partition and manage disk partitions (resizing, deleting partitions) in Linux.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install MySQL 8.0 on CentOS 9 Stream

  MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its more commonly used feature is web database storage and management.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 Community edition on CentOS 9 Stream using the command line terminal with instructions on how to secure the MySQL service, update, and, if necessary remove.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Brave Browser on CentOS 9 Stream

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

  Brave claims that its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome. Even with multiple tabs open at once, the new Brave Software uses 66% less memory and has 50 million more active users than before – a growth of 2X in 5 years!

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on CentOS 9 Stream by importing the official GPG keys and repository with step-by-step instructions on installing, updating, and removing the browser, including disabling/enabling the DNF repository. As a bonus, the beta and nightly optional installation methods are included, installed alongside stable.

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ How To Create YouTube Playlists Using Google Sheets

  Using/watching YouTube is part and parcel of whoever uses any smartphone or PC. We all tend to listen/watch to our favorite content on YouTube, but how many of us create a playlist of our favorite YouTube content? Maybe a few of us have our YouTube playlist, but if I say how many of us create a YouTube playlist using Google sheets? Well, I’m guessing what could be a possible answer. Yes, the answer would be NO!

  Though Google sheets and YouTube are two different kinds of applications, making a YouTube playlist using Google sheets is possible. You just need to know some basic Google sheets formulas to make this happen. To the entire article, you’ll be walked through the process. You might be wondering why didn’t you know or try this before?

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer – Part 15: Square Cubed | GamingOnLinux

  John Carmack’s generosity in releasing his older source code resulted in a proliferation of free first person shooters in the 2000s with almost all of them based on some variation of the Quake engine. This proved to be a boon to Linux gamers, but Dutch programmer Wouter van Oortmerssen rejected this path to forge Cube based in the same “just for fun” spirit with which Linus Torvalds first began work on the Linux kernel.

  Unlike Torvalds though Cube was helped by Oortmerssen’s deliberate rejection of the open source model, which often clashes with the auteur nature of independent game development. The source code is available under the zlib License for anyone to modify, but the distributed game itself is his own curated creation, with his singular vision proving to be what happens when you mix Doom, Quake, and Serious Sam in a blender.

  In the end I had to use the oldest binaries still available from SourceForge, those contained in the cube_2002_10_20.zip archive, as every later packaged version of the game was built against libstdc++5 which is too new for my Red Hat Linux 7.3 installation. This places me in the curious position of being on the opposite end of the glibc 2.3 compatibility problem, as this is the main library which causes issues when running certain Loki Software games on newer systems.

  I did try building the final Cube source code myself on Dianoga, but was not able to provide the ENet development libraries that Cube requires. The last released binaries do still run on my modern Arch Linux computer, although I had to modify the launch script or it would complain “Your processor does not have a supported Cube client” upon discovering I was starting the game under x86_64. Overriding the check resolved this, but it still suffers from a video memory leak.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ How Valve Can Make the Deck Verified Program Better | GamingOnLinux

  In short: I’m responsible for making sure that new versions of games are performant and reliable, and this means passing many of these versions through certification programs. A new Steam Machine directly from Valve was an exciting prospect, but it hasn’t come without its problems. Today we’re going to talk about just one of them:

• GamingOnLinux ☛ ProtonUp-Qt got upgraded, here’s how to use it on Steam Deck and Linux | GamingOnLinux

  ProtonUp-Qt is a very helpful application that can help you install extra compatibility layers on Linux and Steam Deck. It just had small new release, so it’s time to take a better look. New in version 2.6.0 are translations for: german, finnish and spanish plus there’s a new game list dialog.

  It enables you at a few button clicks to download and automatically install Proton-GE, Luxtorpeda, Boxtron or Roberta for Steam. On top of that you can do Wine-GE, Lutris-Wine or Kron4ek’s Vanilla Wine-Builds for Lutris. Need more? It will also handle installing Wine-GE or Proton-GE for the Heroic Games Launcher.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Albion Online now testing gamepad support and ready for Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  If you need another MMO fix in your life, Albion Online is pretty good and has a lot of players. It’s available as a direct standalone download and on Steam. Looks like it might end up quite good on the Steam Deck.

  Coming along with their latest patch that also started Season 15 plenty of other tweaks were done including automatic silver pickup, tweaks to randomized dungeons, combat balance changes and various other adjustments. The big one is of course the new gamepad support, which isn’t quite finished yet.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ The itch.io app works on a Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Do you own a lot of games on itch.io? I do, and a huge amount more from past charity bundles I’ve yet to go and claim so maybe the Steam Deck will help me and you get through them all.

  Since the itch team provide a launcher app, I wanted to see how well it would work on the Steam Deck and there were a few requests to check it out. Thankfully, their native Linux build runs just fine in desktop mode.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Silly physics co-op platformer Super Bunny Man might be worth a look | GamingOnLinux

  I had honestly never heard of Super Bunny Man until a reader emailed it in but it seems quite popular, one of those games to have a proper laugh with a friend as you fail together.

  Currently in Early Access, a Linux version was added up on Steam back in September 2021! Somehow entirely missed here. There’s a Very Positive user rating on Steam from over 2,000 people so the developer clearly has something a little bit special here.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Starting this Summer, iFixit will offer Steam Deck replacement parts | GamingOnLinux

  Even though Valve thinks you shouldn’t open up your Steam Deck, and they would prefer a professional do it, they will still offer parts through iFixit.

  The team at iFixit recently did a video teardown, showing off things Valve suggest not to do as part of their announcement on teaming up with Valve for this. The good news is the wait won’t be too long, as they told The Verge that parts will become available to order “this Summer”.

  If you want to be notified of when they become available, you can sign up to be notified.

  Personally, I don’t think I’ll be opening up my Deck to fiddle around with its insides. I plan to mostly use mine as an actual gaming device, without any hardware adjustments. Will you be opening up yours though? Let us know in the comments.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Okular: Signature support now works on Android

    In that blog what was introduced was the new user interface to be able to see digital signatures in the mobile interface (i.e. the one that uses Kirigami instead of QWidgets).

    You can use the Okular mobile interface anywhere you want, it’s not really mobile-only, it’s really mobile-optimized, so you can try it (though you’ll have to build it manually since most distributions don’t build it by default) on desktop Linux too.

    Anyway, in that previous blog I talked about introducing the new user interface to be able to see digital signatures, and that worked out of the box in places that provide NSS like desktop Linux or Plasma Phone distributions (Aleix tried on the PinePhone and confirmed it works), but for Android it still did not work.

    [...]

    The workaround to make androiddeployqt work for plugins is basically linking the plugins to your binary, this way the plugin is a clear dependency and gets packaged, but did I say things are never simple enough?

    In KDE we have binary-factory continuous integration for Android and we also have gitlab continuous integration for Android, unfortunately they use different ways of building, the first uses Craft, the second does not. This means that in gitlab CI the NSS library is not available, so I can’t link to it, but i need to link to it so that Craft on the binary-factory CI creates the APK files correctly.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Plasma secrets: custom shortcuts and actions

    After I wrote my review of Ksnip, a handy screenshot tool, someone commented that they would like to be able to associate this program with their shortcut for capturing screenshots. In particular, they also said they would like to be able to take rectangular areas rather than fullscreen or windowed area. This got me thinking, and I figured, perhaps there is some tutorial material here?

    The answer is, yes. Now, my mission today is twofold. One, show you how you can assign custom shortcuts to custom actions in Plasma. Two, showcase yet again the amazing and neverending flexibility of the Plasma desktop environment, because nothing else does it half as good as Plasma. In fact, the whole thing reminds me of that catchy, cheesy song The Spy Who Loved Me, the theme sequence from the namesake 007 Bond movie. And it opens with the following lyrics: Nobody does it better, I feel sad for the rest … Indeed, let is commence this tutorial.

  • Fetching APIs with Qt

    In these past two weeks I’ve been learning how to fetch APIs with Qt and I finally got something working! In this blog post we’re going to create a little application to fetch data from a specific github user.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Automating storage management with RHEL System Roles

    Automation can help increase efficiency, save time, and improve consistency, which is why Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) includes features that help automate many tasks. RHEL System Roles is a collection of Ansible content included in RHEL to help provide consistent workflows and streamline the execution of many manual tasks.

    RHEL contains a storage system role that can automate the configuration of logical volume manager (LVM) volume groups, logical volumes, and filesystems. The storage role supports creating filesystems on unpartitioned disks without the use of LVM as well. In addition, the storage role can automate advanced storage functionality such as encryption, deduplication, compression, and RAID.

    The “Managing local storage using RHEL System Roles” documentation includes information and example playbooks covering how to use the storage system role in many different scenarios.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat Summit 2021 retrospective

    Red Hat Summit 2022 dates have been announced (spoiler alert, it’s happening on May 10-11, 2022), and while registration isn’t open quite yet, stay tuned for news about that coming very soon.

    [...]

    The full Red Hat Summit 2021 catalog contains over 275 sessions that are available on demand. Helpfully, these have also been organized into six different channels so it’s easier for you to find the stuff you’re really interested in.

    Here’s what each of those channels has to offer.

  • Open source security fears are fading away | ZDNet

    A big majority (89%) of IT chiefs believe open-source software is as secure as proprietary software, according to a survey by IBM-owned Red Hat, the maintainer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Devices/Embedded

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Firefly’s Mini-ITX features an RK3588, 32GB RAM, four SATA, and three HDMI

  
  The 8nm-fabricated RK3588 has 4x up to 2.4GHz Cortex-A76 and 4x up to 1.8GHz -A55 cores. There is also a powerful Mali G610MC4 GPU and a 6-TOPS NPU (up from 3 TOPs on Rockchip’s RK3399Pro and RK1808). The RK3588 delivers about 3x time faster performance than the RK3399 using Geekbench 4 CPU benchmarks and delivers even faster GPU performance.

  The ITX-3588J offers a choice of Android 12, Ubuntu Desktop and Server, Debian 11, Buildroot, RTLinux, Kylin Linux, and UOS. The board, which we saw on Tom’s Hardware, also supports UEFI Boot.

  The Core module housing the RK3588 is equipped with 4GB to 16GB LPDDR4, LPDDR4x, or LPDDR5, with 32GB RAM available as an option. The module also incorporates 16GB to 128GB eMMC.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino IDE 2 delivers auto-updater and more

    It’s not that long since Arduino IDE 2 came out of beta, and already we’re on release candidate 4. And it’s well worth the update, as there are some excellent new features that you won’t want to miss out on.

  • Ubuntu ☛ The State of IoT – February 2022 | Ubuntu

    One could aptly name this February State of IoT as the State of Silicon. With the much-anticipated partnership between ARM and NVIDIA halting to a grind, Intel grabbed this month’s headlines by investing in the open RISC-V architecture and announcing a new fund promoting disruptive startups. Let’s dive straight in!

  • CNX Software ☛ Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 ships with 8 MB Flash, 2 MB PSRAM, USB-C port, and more – CNX Software

    Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 (aka Huzzah32 Feather V2) is an upgrade to the company’s HUZZAH32 ESP32 Feather, still based on ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth processor, and designed with the initial goal of replacing the obsolete CP2104 with the CP2012N USB to TLL chip.

    But Adafruit ended up doing a complete redesign with extra storage (8MB flash in total), 2MB PSRAM, a USB-C port replacing the Micro USB port, an extra tactile switch, an RGB LED, lower power consumption, and more.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Linuxiac ☛ 3 Most Secure Linux Web Browsers That Protect Your Privacy

    In this article, we’re looking at the most secure browsers for Linux that also protect your privacy.

    When it comes to a web browser or browsing apps on Linux, there are many choices. Most people don’t worry much about what kind of browser they’re using. However, because your browser is the interface through which you will interact with the majority of the internet, it is responsible for a large amount of sensitive personal data.

    You will probably be surprised to learn that your browser still reveals your location and device to third-party sites, trackers, and advertisers, even if you’re using “private” or “incognito” mode.

    As you know, we live in a world where our personal information is passed back and forth between companies. Advertisers, ISPs, governments, and corporations can track your internet actions click by click if you aren’t vigilant. What is the most effective strategy to avoid this?

  • Chromium

    • Google ☛ A new speed milestone for Chrome

      Everyday, billions of people around the world turn to Chrome to get things done quickly on their devices, whether shopping for a new pair of headphones or pulling together a sales report for work. Nothing is more frustrating than having a slow experience while browsing the web. That’s why Chrome has always been focused on building the fastest possible browser since its launch in 2008, without compromising on feature functionality or security. In our first The Fast and the Curious post of 2022, we are thrilled to celebrate how in the M99 release of Chrome we were able to substantially increase the speed of Chrome across all major platforms.

      We go deep on every platform where Chrome runs to provide the fastest possible experience. We’re excited to announce that in M99, Chrome on Mac has achieved the highest score to date of any browser – 300 – in Apple’s Speedometer browser responsiveness benchmark.

  • Mozilla

    • 9to5Linux ☛ Firefox 98 Is Now Available for Download with a New Optimized Download Flow

      
      While Mozilla sticks to its monthly release cycle for new Firefox releases, it would appear that Firefox 98 is a minor update that only brings a few changes. One of the biggest changes is a new optimized download flow where files are downloaded automatically without prompting the user to choose between opening the file with a certain application or saving it.

      In previous Firefox releases, the user was prompted by a dialog when attempting to download a file. That dialog contained an option that let you do just that, setting one of the available actions (open or save), but only for certain types of files. Now, this is done automatically in Firefox 98 for all downloadable files.

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Firefox 98 Released, Promises to Nag Less During Downloads

      Mozilla Firefox 98 has arrived on schedule to serve as the latest update to the revered open source web browser.

      If you found the last few Firefox releases a little lite on changes you will be frustrated to hear that that trend doesn’t end here. Still: while there aren’t very many “shiny new things” to gawk at or poke in Firefox 98 will find, as always, an attentive array of smaller improvements, performance tweaks, and security enhancements.

      Firefox 98 touts an ‘optimised download flow’ that changes some of the browser’s long-standing behaviours.

      For instance, Firefox 98 no-longer asks you what to do when a download is initiated. In older versions of the browser a prompt appears asking you to pick an app to open the file in, or save it to disk instead. Firefox 98 automatically downloads items to the specified download location, no end-user input needed.

    • USCERT ☛ Mozilla Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products

      Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.  

      CISA encourages users and administrators to review Mozilla security advisory MFSA 2022-09 and apply the necessary updates.

    • 4 Ways To Install Firefox 98.0 On Ubuntu / Linux Mint / AlmaLinux & Fedora | Tips On UNIX

      This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Firefox 98.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, Almalinux 8, and Fedora 35.

      Firefox or Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.

      It is a Cross-platform web browser available for Android, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Linux systems.

      Firefox 98.0 is scheduled to be released on March 8, 2022, but the source file is available for users to download ahead of tomorrow’s official launch.

• Programming/Development

  • Progress Report!! Modifying Expectations…

    As part of the requirements for the final application during the contribution period for the Outreachy internship, I needed to provide a timeline to achieve our goal on my outreachy task which is transitioning of dependencies in node16 and webpack5.

  • Perl/Raku

    • gfldex: That meant war

      I try to avoid to allow politics or current events to seep into my blog. The topic is the 100 year language and as such wont be history. Sadly, the head-oligarch has publicly given obvious bullshit-reasons to invade a neighbouring country. I would like to use the powers of … to shed some light into the current darkness.

      The official numbers (read: favouringly rounded up) for the population of Russia is 145805947 people. If only they could get themselves a decent government, that could have been quite a few hugs. But hugging they ain’t do enough, resulting in a birthrate of 1.82 children per woman. Let’s write that down.

    • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly News: 2022.09/10 Universally Promoted

      kapitaali_com wondered whether Raku is mature enough to build a university level computer science course around it. And a positive discussion followed. Looking forward to the first result of anybody picking up on this!

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Tech Giants Sanctions Against Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine [Ed: Reminder that nobody should ever rely on proprietary software, for many reasons including risks like these]

    Last month when Russia started invading Ukraine, several European countries responded against the invasion by imposing sanctions on Russia, affecting several Russian industries including Oil processing. But it was not over yet, soon tech giants including Twitter, Google, and Facebook paused advertisements and other services till the conflict ends.

    Last week Reddit quarantined r/Russia and r/RussiaPolitics for spreading misinformation in the subreddit. After quarantining the subreddit, Reddit suggestion system stopped suggesting it resulting in lowering the particular subreddit’s discovery across the Reddit platform.

    Twitter also halted its advertisement system in Russia and Ukraine to prevent misinformation from spreading. As a result, Twitter and Facebook, both were restricted across Russia.

  • Security

    • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, containerd, cyrus-sasl2, expat, firefox-esr, freecad, kernel, and tiff), Fedora (seamonkey, swtpm, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (docker-containerd, firefox, flac, libtiff, libxml2, and mc), openSUSE (containerd, expat, flatpak, gnutls, go1.16, go1.17, libeconf, shadow and util-linux, mariadb, nodejs14, perl-App-cpanminus, vim, wireshark, wpa_supplicant, and zsh), SUSE (containerd, expat, flatpak, gnutls, go1.16, go1.17, java-11-openjdk, kernel-firmware, libeconf, shadow and util-linux, libxml2, mariadb, nodejs14, python-Twisted, vim, wireshark, wpa_supplicant, and zsh), and Ubuntu (firefox, openjdk-lts, openjdk-17, and php8.0).

    • LWN ☛ The “dirty pipe” vulnerability

      Max Kellermann has disclosed a disconcerting kernel vulnerability…

    • The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability

      It all started a year ago with a support ticket about corrupt files. A customer complained that the access logs they downloaded could not be decompressed. And indeed, there was a corrupt log file on one of the log servers; it could be decompressed, but gzip reported a CRC error. I could not explain why it was corrupt, but I assumed the nightly split process had crashed and left a corrupt file behind. I fixed the file’s CRC manually, closed the ticket, and soon forgot about the problem.

      Months later, this happened again and yet again. Every time, the file’s contents looked correct, only the CRC at the end of the file was wrong. Now, with several corrupt files, I was able to dig deeper and found a surprising kind of corruption. A pattern emerged.

    • A Summary of Census II: Open Source Software Application Libraries the World Depends On [Ed: Made on an Apple Mac]

      It has been estimated that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) constitutes 70-90% of any given piece of modern software solutions. FOSS is an increasingly vital resource in nearly all industries, public and private sectors, among tech and non-tech companies alike. Therefore, ensuring the health and security of FOSS is critical to the future of nearly all industries in the modern economy.

      In March of 2022, The Linux Foundation, in partnership with the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH), released the final results of an ongoing study, “Census II of Free and Open Source Software – Application Libraries.” This follows the preliminary release, “Vulnerabilities in the Core,’ a Preliminary Report and Census II of Open Source Software” in February 2020 and now identifies more than one thousand of the most widely deployed open source application libraries found from scans of commercial and enterprise applications. This study informs what open source projects are commonly used in applications warrant proactive analysis of operations and security support.

    • H2S Media ☛ 4 Best Linux Open source Firewall for Cyber Security – 2022

      
      We need a well-configured Firewall, which is a key component of network security when we are about to expose our internal network to the outside world. Although our operating systems come with some kind of firewall software, however, they are not enough to protect each device of a network. Hence, we need a dedicated Firewall. The advantage of open-source firewalls is that it is completely free and there are no verifiable backdoors because the open-source firewall code is known and has a good reputation. It usually takes a little longer to install and configure this, but this technology is worth a closer look and is worthwhile.

      One of the other benefits of using open source firewalls is they are not restricted to some particular hardware type. The user can install them on the existing hardware and connect them to the Internet. In this way, they work quickly and do not compromise the security of the network. On the contrary, especially for administrators who have less experience, open-source firewalls bring great advantages, because they are quicker and easier to set up. Of course, one cannot expect a free, open-source firewall variant to have the same functions and support services as a paid commercial firewall. However, this is not absolutely necessary as long as you have a stable internet connection.

    • CISA ☛ CISA Adds 11 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog  [Ed: Proprietary software for the most part]

      CISA has added eleven new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

    • Nmap Firewall Evasion Techniques | LinuxSecurity.com

      The primary goal of firewall penetration testing is to prevent unauthorized internet access to your organization’s internal network, or check to make sure your security policy is doing what you think it’s doing. In order to successfully test your organization’s firewall, you must think like the adversary. Collecting intelligence on the network, such as operating system and firewall type, are important to know in order to proceed with the penetration test.

    • MITRE ATT&CK & D3FEND » ADMIN Magazine

      IT security affects many different areas of a company. Trying to identify possible attack vectors for each area in advance and protect the IT infrastructure with effective countermeasures can be a Sisyphean task, especially for companies without a Security Operation Center (SOC). When it comes to implementing security measures, knowledge and experience are important.

      MITRE, a nonprofit organization that operates various research facilities on behalf of the U.S. government, provides comprehensive information on IT security. MITRE developed the CVE system, for identifying and assigning unique identifiers to vulnerabilities, and also developed STIX and CyBox, which are used to exchange threat information and attack indicators.

      The MITRE ATT&CK and D3FEND knowledge databases offer techniques that let you retrace an attacker’s steps, as well as prevent attacks in the first place. Here’s how to use these techniques to secure your enterprise IT.

    • Keeping Ubuntu Linux Secure with Latest SUSE Manager 4.2 | SUSE Communities

      For some time now, Ubuntu LTS has been a supported client system for SUSE Manager. We build and support binary clients for Ubuntu 1804, 2004, and soon 2204 releases. Our ongoing strategy is to allow customers to manage the Linux distributions they need with SUSE Manager.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Confidentiality

        • Attackers can force Amazon Echos to hack themselves with self-issued commands

          Academic researchers have devised a new working exploit that commandeers Amazon Echo smart speakers and forces them to unlock doors, make phone calls and unauthorized purchases, and control furnaces, microwave ovens, and other smart appliances.

          The attack works by using the device’s speaker to issue voice commands. As long as the speech contains the device wake word (usually “Alexa” or “Echo”) followed by a permissible command, the Echo will carry it out, researchers from Royal Holloway University in London and Italy’s University of Catania found. Even when devices require verbal confirmation before executing sensitive commands, it’s trivial to bypass the measure by adding the word “yes” about six seconds after issuing the command. Attackers can also exploit what the researchers call the “FVV,” or full voice vulnerability, which allows Echos to make self-issued commands without temporarily reducing the device volume.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Revealed: Rajasthan’s Review Committee does not meet or review internet suspension orders. #KeepItOn

  The Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India & Others, (2020) 3 SCC 637 directed the executive to publish internet suspension orders and to ensure the orders are lawful, necessary and proportionate. Yet, the executive continues to not comply with these directions. We regularly file right to information (‘RTI’) applications with governments seeking responses on whether the executive is complying with the directions. The State of Rajasthan has responded to our latest application where they have stated that their review committee does not meet and record findings on the legality of internet suspension orders – it only confirms them, and that too by circulation. This is despite Rule 2(6) of Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 (‘Telecom Suspension Rules’) which mandates the review committee to meet within five days of an internet suspension order and record their findings on its legality. We have appealed this response.

  [...]

  This is illegal under Rule 2(6) of Telecom Suspension Rules, which mandates the Review Committee to meet within five days of an internet shutdown order and record its findings on whether the internet shutdown order was issued in accordance with Section 5(2) of the Telegraph Act, 1885. Merely confirming the orders, without recording findings or even convening meetings shows a serious non-application of mind, and entirely vitiates the oversight mechanism instituted under the Telecom Suspension Rules.

  Moreover, the suspension of internet services seriously impacts several fundamental rights of millions of affected Indians. Internet suspension must be seen as an extreme and exceptional step, only to be taken in cases of public emergency. This is why the Telecom Suspension Rules require a high-level committee of executive members to meet within five days, every time there is an internet suspension. Such meetings cannot be dispensed with simply by receiving suspension orders by circulation. This practice undermines the fundamental rights of Indians.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ Raw Steam Deck Recording using OBS Studio and Internal Mic – Invidious

Kernel Space

• JAXenter ☛ I’m a Linux expert – here’s why I think the kernel is so important [iophk: obnoxious revisionism – by 1999 GNU/Linux was running the WWW and most of the rest of The Internet]

  In its 30 years of existence, the Linux kernel has had a massive impact on the modern computing landscape – revolutionizing what’s possible for operating systems and allowing countless tinkerers to get their hands dirty in the process. In this article, Cara Nolte, Training Architect at A Cloud Guru, a Pluralsight Company, discusses the importance of the Linux kernel and why it’s here to stay.

  Last year, the Linux kernel turned 30. If you’re someone who’s been immersed in the Linux world since Y2K like me, it may feel a bit surreal that so much time has passed since the kernel’s inception.

  As a training architect at A Cloud Guru (ACG), I teach courses about all things Linux and specialise in hands-on, lab-based learning. Before joining ACG, I worked as a Unix systems engineer at GE and IBM as well as Technical Account Manager and customer advocate for Red Hat. I’m hugely passionate about Linux because of its importance to my career, just like to the careers of so many other engineers and Linux enthusiasts.

• Graphics Stack

  • PowerVR Vulkan driver

    Hi All,

    I’m excited to share that over the last year we’ve been working on a new Vulkan driver, compiler and Linux kernel DRM driver for our PowerVR GPUs. As it was important for us to do things “right”, we got Collabora involved early on in the project. They’ve been a big help and have guided us with the approach and overall design of the driver.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Imagination Technologies bringing open source PowerVR drivers | GamingOnLinux

    Well well, open source continues to grow, good! Imagination Technologies will be joining up with all the rest involved in Mesa development, with their PowerVR GPUs. Developer Frank Binns put up a Merge Request for Mesa that was announced here on a mailing list.

  • WCCF Tech ☛ AMDGPU Linux driver update allows multiple users across several engines to execute simultaneously

    The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver will see a new interface that allows user-space to introduce assignments to the GPU coding that qualified users will simultaneously implement across numerous engines.

    Christian König, a longtime AMD open-source Linux driver developer, dispatched the new “gang submission” interface patch series earlier this week for the platform’s AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver. The submission for the AMD Radeon command stream (CS) ensures that the work will be conducted on various engines simultaneously.

Applications

• Its FOSS ☛ Coolero: Open-Source App to Manage Cooling Devices on Linux

  When it comes to Linux, we do not get official software support from brands like NZXT, Corsair, MSI, ASUS, etc., to manage hardware components on PC.

  While open-source drivers/tools are available to make things work, it is still a work in progress in programs with a graphical user interface (GUI).

  For instance, when configuring a gaming mouse or setting up razer devices on Linux.

  Fortunately, things have improved over the years, and now it is possible to manage/tweak a wide range of the latest peripherals and components on Linux.

• Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Google Analytics – LinuxLinks

  Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

  What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

  In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Find WiFi Passwords on Linux, Windows and Mac

  Connecting securely to the internet requires you to have a preconfigured access point through which you can securely connect to the world wide web. These are usually a variation of the WPA protocol that includes Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2), and Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) with the second one being the most ubiquitous.

  Thankfully, it also has the real advantage of being encrypted by the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) standard and with a designated enterprise variant, WPA2 Enterprise.

• Linux Handbook ☛ How to Go to the Beginning or End of File in Vim

  Knowing to move to top or bottom of a file is extremely useful while dealing with large text files in Vim.

• How to Install Dash Framework in Python on Linux

  Written on top of Flask, React.js, and Plotly.js, Dash is an open-source Python framework for rapidly building and deploying interactive web applications. With Dash, you can create stunning analytic dashboards which are viewed from a web browser.

  To work with Dash, you don’t need to be proficient with front-end technologies such HTML, CSS, and Javascript – although it does go a long way in being proficient in such you only need to be good in Python.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Increase DNF Speed on CentOS 9 Stream

  CentOS 9 Stream users may notice that the DNF download speed is slow compared to other distributions, and this will be frustrating after you have to download and install many packages. Most users do not realize that some minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to configure and increase your DNF package manager download, update or upgrade speed on CentOS 9 Stream workstation or server by adding and increasing parallel package downloads and mirror sources to find the fastest speed to get your packages from.

• Blurring unfocused terminals in picom

  After an extended break I have started using dwm again as my main window manager after being in KDE land for a bit. I had a pretty good setup going before with transparency and a custom status bar but this time I wanted to use the chadwm fork as the base for my current rice.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Etcher on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Etcher on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Etcher is a free and open-source USB image writer for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is used to flash OS images to USB drives, SD Cards, or Raspberry Pi devices. This enables users to create bootable flash drives.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Etcher on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Dorfromantik gets controller upgrades for the Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Dorfromantik is a ridiculously popular peaceful building strategy and puzzle game and now it should work a little better on the Steam Deck. With an Overwhelmingly Positive user score on Steam, seems it’s one not to miss.

  Along with a bunch of other improvements, the controls have been ported over to gamepads specifically for the Steam Deck. It’s not quite finished, with multiple parts needing improvements but the remaining parts the developer said can be used with the touchscreen for now. They have plans to upgrade it further in future to ensure great gamepad support but that will come after the main launch “this spring”.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Its FOSS ☛ Budgie 10.6 is Here as its First Release Under the New Organization

  Back in January, ex-co-lead of Solus Joshua Strobl made headlines after leaving Solus to work on SerpentOS.

  You can read more about it in our original coverage. However, he still wanted to work on the Budgie desktop environment, so he forked the project (in a new repository) and formed the Buddies Of Budgie organization. Three months later, the first release since this organizational change has arrived, which we will be looking at here.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • What’s new with Java 17 and containers? | Opensource.com

    This article shows how Quarkus allows developers to start a new application development based on OpenJDK 17. Furthermore, Quarkus increases developers’ productivity by live coding. For a production deployment, developers can make a native executable based on OpenJDK 17 and GraalVM.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Check your YAML for errors with yamllint | Enable Sysadmin

    Computers thrive on consistency. The reason programming and markup languages (like YAML) have a syntax is because computers cannot derive context from data. In natural languages, we use conventions like commas, quotation marks, and parentheses to help each other parse what we write. However, even without these assistive characters, most of us can still comprehend the communication. Computers don’t have that ability, so they rely on rules that dictate what kind of data you provide as input.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Artificial Intelligence (AI): 3 strategies for advancing your career [Ed: Red Hat is a buzzwords company]

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting businesses and job roles in every industry, causing concerns about long-term job security for low-skill manual jobs and management roles alike.

    To prepare for this AI-driven economy, many experienced managers and seasoned executives are turning to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to upskill in foundational data analytics and AI. This trend is unlikely to slow down anytime soon: The global MOOC market is expected to grow from $3.9 billion in 2018 to $20.8 billion by 2023, a CAGR of 40.1 percent.

    Business and technology-related courses make up 40 percent of these online courses. Many universities have also joined the drive to fill the AI leadership gap by offering high-touch executive education programs.

    While upskilling programs are easily accessible, many executives are unsure how to leverage their newfound skills to advance their careers. Becoming an AI “practitioner” may not be the right option for some given the high technical bar for these roles. Others may rule out “juniorizing,” which could take them a few steps back in their career.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Agile transformation: 3 ways to achieve success

    Over the last two years, organizations have shifted plans and priorities to meet the challenges of a new hybrid workplace. Planning, along with the ability to adjust and reset as necessary, are important. The last two years have exposed areas within organizations that are stagnant, outdated, or bottlenecked.

    IT departments that were slow to ramp up their digital transformation had a lot of ground to make up. Customers demand exceptional service and immediate response. Companies with outdated succession plans were forced to revisit and revise them due to The Great Resignation and the scarcity of experienced workers. Remote work created silos, impeding collaboration and onboarding.

    As a result, agile transformation progress has taken on greater importance. Companies must act quickly and effectively to industry, organizational, and cultural changes. How can organizations maintain business productivity while ensuring the employee experience is collaborative? And how can you, as an IT leader, measure your organization’s progress to ensure that the entire enterprise is agile and can respond effectively?

Devices/Embedded

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • CNX Software ☛ Eufy Security Video Smart Lock is a 3-in-1 doorbell, security camera, and door lock (Crowdfunding) – CNX Software

  • Hacker News ☛ SharkBot Banking Malware Spreading via Fake Android Antivirus App on Google Play Store

  • What Is An App Drawer In Android And 3 Ways To Use It Optimally

  • XDA ☛ Sony Xperia 5 II starts receiving Android 12 update

  • Retro Review : Nokia 8, HMD’s first Android Flagship – Nokiapoweruser

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Get started with EGroupware, an open source alternative to Microsoft 365

  A groupware solution is a must-have, whether you’re working in a small organization, a medium-sized company, or a large enterprise. It promotes collaboration and glues teams together. Are you looking for an open source alternative to the big players? Maybe EGroupware can replace Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace in your team soon.

  This article shows how to install EGroupware on your own server and how to set up the groupware solution for your organization. It also gives a brief introduction to EGroupware’s modules and applications. I’ll provide tips and tricks for the administration of EGroupware in a future article.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Sparklines in Calc

    To add support in LibreOffice for sparklines, we need to first read them into the LibreOffice data model, but the data model for sparklines doesn’t yet exists, so we need to create that first. Sparklines are defined for one cell, but multiple sparklines can be grouped together into a group, which shares the same properties for rendering the sparkline. The unique data that is defined only for one sparkline is the data range, that a sparkline will use for rendering.

    With this in mind we create a data model that consists of classes: SparklineCell -> Sparkline -> SparklineGroup, where SparklineCell is “added” to a cell and just holds a pointer to the Sparkline.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • Techdirt ☛ Some Known Issues With The New Techdirt

    Well, that’s a wrap on our first week with Techdirt running on WordPress. Overall things have been working pretty well, but as expected there have also been several issues and some things that need improvement. We’ve been tracking user feedback in the comments and via the contact form, and I want to assure everyone that we’re working through the list as quickly as we can! Today, I want to share a few of the issues that we know about and are currently working on. This is not an exhaustive list, so if you don’t see something here that you’ve been concerned about, don’t worry — that doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of it!

• Programming/Development

  • Qt ☛ Qt Roadmap for 2022

    Qt 6.2 was released in September 2021, delivering the first Long-Term Supported (LTS) version within the Qt 6 series. With Qt 6.3 getting close to the finish, it is a good time to reflect on what the next steps for the Qt product will be.

    But first, it is important to state that we would not have come so far without the strong support of our community. Contributions, reports, and mailing list discussions are equally beneficial to bring different perspectives to The Qt Company, steer us towards common needs, and tackle the biggest areas to improve upon. Thanks to everyone who helped us make each version of Qt a better one than before. In this post, we will focus mostly on The Qt Company’s efforts for Qt. There are many extra items coming from individual contributors as well as companies in the ecosystem.

  • Gemini client devlog 1: Parsing gemtext

    I’m completely new to JavaScript, so I figured I’d familiarize myself with the easier task of parsing gemtext and converting gmi documents to HTML.

  • Languages You Shouldn’t Learn

    The other problem is that not everyone wants to work in big tech or with the newest hottest machines. There are still a mind-boggling amount of mainframes out there and they are all dependant on COBOL and most likely nothing newer than COBOL-85. This doesn’t meean everyone should learn COBOL, but it means if you want to work on mainframes in wallstreet, insurance companies, banks, etc. you could have a better shot than the person who only knows javascript or swift.

    [...]

    Learn the language(s) that you either need for a job or that just makes you happy. Sometimes it is more than one. That is perfectly fine. My coding toolbox has many tools, but my default three are Go for the back-end api, Delphi for the native apps (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android), and vanilla js for web front-ends. A language is just a tool to help you solve a problem. Use the right tool for the right job and don’t let a list make you miserable.

  • Python

    • Manage Python security with Thoth’s cloud-based dependency resolver

      Developers and data scientists who want to build healthy and high-performance Python applications often face challenges related to dependency management, including security risks introduced by the installation of dependencies. This article presents a quick introduction to managing Python dependencies with Project Thoth. The included video tutorial shows you how Thoth’s cloud-based resolver finds problems in your Python dependencies and execution environment. Thoth’s resolver is a drop-in replacement for other Python resolvers such as pip, Pipenv, or Poetry. Thoth’s resolution process can also be used in containerized environments.

Don’t Have a Fun Game

At the end of the day, it’s engagement that counts – the players must buy into the stakes and must care about the results. Talking about ‘fun’ means talking about a non-game concept. It detracts from the game.

Education

• TruthOut ☛ Educators in St. Paul and Minneapolis Are Preparing for Potential Strike

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ An Interview With Reinhard Keil

  Over on the Embedded FM podcast, [Chris] and [Elecia] just released their interview with [Reinhard Keil] of compiler fame. [Reinhard] recounts the story of Keil’s growth and how it eventually became absorbed into Arm back in 2005. Along with his brother Günter, the two founded the company as Keil Software in the Americas, and Keil Elektronik in Europe. They initially made hardware products, but as the company grew, they became dissatisfied with the quality and even existence of professional firmware development tools of the day. Their focus gradually shifted to making a CP/M- and a PC-based development environment, and in 1988, they introduced the first C-compiler designed for the 8051 from the ground up.

• Hackaday ☛ Nintendo Switch Runs Vita Software With Vita2hos

  Good news for fans of PlayStation Vita — a new project from [Sergi “xerpi” Granell] allows users to run software written for Sony’s erstwhile handheld system on Nintendo’s latest money printing machine, the Switch. To be clear, there’s a very long road ahead before the vita2hos project is able to run commercial games (if ever). But it’s already able to run simple CPU-rendered Vita homebrew binaries on the Switch, demonstrating the concept is sound.

• Hackaday ☛ Retro Serial Terminal Uses Modern Chips To Get CP/M Machine Talking

  The hobbyists of the early days of the home computer era worked wonders with the comparatively primitive chips of the day, and what couldn’t be accomplished with a Z80 or a 6502 was often relegated to complex designs based on logic chips and discrete components. One wonders what these hackers could have accomplished with the modern components we take for granted.

• Hackaday ☛ Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher

  If you’ve gone to a local city park lately, you might have noticed strange metal baskets on poles with chains dangling free. These baskets are spread out throughout the park seemingly at random. For the uninitiated, Frisbee golf (sometimes known as disc golf) is a confusing concept. You might not think it, but Frisbee golf can be a very big deal to some people. [Stuff Made Here] is back with a disc launcher that he hopes will put all the disc golfers to shame.

• Hackaday ☛ Vintage Meter Repair? It’s Easier With X-Rays

  Here’s an interesting and detailed teardown and repair of a Keithley 2001 7.5 Digit multimeter that is positively dripping with detail. It’s also not every day that we get to see someone using x-ray imaging to evaluate the extent of PCB damage caused by failed electrolytic capacitors.

• Hackaday ☛ How To Solder To Aluminum, Easily

  [Ted Yapo] shared a method of easily and conveniently soldering to aluminum, which depends on a little prep work to end up only slightly more complex than soldering to copper. A typical way to make a reliable electrical connection to aluminum is to use a screw and a wire, but [Ted] shows that it can also be done with the help of an abrasive and mineral oil.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Salon ☛ Covid-positive deer may be harboring the virus and infecting humans, study says

  Ominously, the infection trend may now be going the other way. A recent Canadian study raises the possibility that deer — one of the most ubiquitous large mammals in North America — may have infected humans with COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. That would imply the virus circulated for a while in deer, reproducing and occasionally mutating on its way, before jumping back into people.

Defence/Aggression

• Hungary ☛ The outbreak of war has ushered in a new campaign – the fourth week of the campaign in five points

  The Russian-Ukrainian war is radically rewriting everything on a global scale, and the election campaign in Hungary is no exception. The events of the war not only overshadow the campaign but also force all of its participants to rethink their strategies. For this reason, the war has clearly been the main issue for the past several days. The fact that MSZP politicians were implicated in corruption or that several candidates made it onto the ballot under suspicious circumstances barely incited a reaction among voters. Translated by Dominic Spadacene

• Counter Punch ☛ Russia’s Unprecedented Shelling of Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Raises Fears of Another Chernobyl

• Counter Punch ☛ The Kremlin Goes Neocon

  Chaotic scenes at the Dnipro train station as young families and elderly women alike jump off the platform and cross the tracks by foot, desperate to escape the approaching onslaught. Another city emptied of its people.

  A blinding flash of fiery lightning illuminates the night sky outside Kyiv, the shockwave following a few seconds later like wake lines from a ravenous shark. Another pound of Ukrainian flesh.

• TruthOut ☛ Immigrant’s Lynching in Brazil Forces Us to Confront Xenophobia and Colonialism

• TruthOut ☛ Why It’s Hard for Most People in the US to Talk About War

• TruthOut ☛ Putin Issues Warning About “Future of Ukrainian Statehood” Amid Refugee Crisis

• Common Dreams ☛ Thousands Arrested as Russians Join Global Anti-War Protests

  Thousands of people were arrested in Russia on Sunday for joining a global day of action against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, which has killed at least hundreds of civilians and created a refugee crisis.

  Although Russian authorities have cracked down on protests and critical reporting since the February 24 invasion, 4,849 people were detained in 69 cities across Russia as of 2:09 am in Moscow, according to the independent monitor OVD-Info.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Invasion of Ukraine and the Need for Enforceable World Law

  On February 24, 2022, one part of the country I was born in attacked another part of the country I was born in, with potentially devastating consequences for the world.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Russian Invasion Threatens All Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plants

  Russian troops in Ukraine seized Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant Friday after shelling set part of the complex on fire, ringing alarm bells around the world of a potential nuclear disaster.

• Common Dreams ☛ As Over 1.5 Million People Flee, Putin Threatens Ukrainian Statehood

  Despite evacuation efforts hampered by Russian shelling, Ukraine is enduring Europe’s most rapidly escalating refugee crisis since the second world war, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said Sunday.

  “More than 1.5 million refugees from Ukraine have crossed into neighboring countries in 10 days—the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” tweeted the commissioner, Filippo Grandi.

• Common Dreams ☛ Report Details ‘Unraveling’ of Trump Probe That Led Prosecutors to Resign

  The New York Times on Saturday published a detailed account of what led two prosecutors involved with the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business practices to abruptly resign last month—a “seismic development” that some experts had called “troubling.”

  The probe was launched under the former district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., who did not seek reelection. When prosecutors Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz resigned, the newspaper reported that it was because the new DA, Alvin Bragg, had concerns about moving forward with the case.

• When is a no-fly zone not a no-fly zone? When it’s an airlift. | I, Cringely

  This was the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. Post-war Germany was partitioned into sectors administered separately by the major Allied powers. The city of Berlin, buried deep in the Soviet sector of Germany, was similarly partitioned. So there were American- and British- and French-administered parts of Berlin. Access from the rest of Europe was by road, rail, or air with trains and trucks passing through a Soviet-ruled countryside. That was until the Russians decided to shut down those roads and railways in 1948, keeping Berlin from receiving both fuel and food.

  The only remaining access to Berlin was by air and so the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force flew everything into Berlin for a year and a half. Four hundred airplanes flew continuously, carrying up to 12,000 tons per day, 60 percent of which was coal. When the 6000-foot runway at Tempelhof Airport had to be repaved, the asphalt arrived by air.

  This transport force was mainly C-47s and C-54s, but included even Shorts Sunderland flying boats that landed on the Havel River. The transports were harassed by Soviet fighters, but never shot down.

Environment

• UN: Climate change to uproot millions, especially in Asia

  As the world’s most rapidly sinking major city, Jakarta demonstrates how climate change is making more places uninhabitable. With an estimated one-third of the city expected to be submerged in the coming decades – in part because of the rising Java Sea – the Indonesian government is planning to move its capital some 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) northeast to the island of Borneo, relocating as many as 1.5 million civil servants.

• Energy

  • Common Dreams ☛ Oil and Gas Giants Under Fire for Fueling Russian War on Ukraine

    Climate campaigners worldwide called out major oil and gas companies this weekend for fueling conflict around the world, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, and demanded a shift to renewables.

    “Putin’s invasion is yet another example of the many conflicts fueled by oil and gas across the world.”

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ The New Deal, Writers and Rediscovering America

• TruthOut ☛ Sanctions May Sound “Nonviolent,” But They Quietly Hurt the Most Vulnerable

• TruthOut ☛ Advocates Push Biden to Cancel Student Debt as He Mulls Extending Payment Pause

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Louisiana’s Governor Must Veto the Proposed Redistricting Maps

  The governor of Louisana has a unique chance to ensure that Black Louisianans have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice to Congress. That’s why the ACLU and our coalition partners in the region are calling on Gov. John Bel Edwards to veto the proposed congressional and state legislative districting plans, submitted to his office by the Louisiana State Legislature.

• The Verge ☛ Facebook won’t let Russian advertisers create or make run ads ‘anywhere in the world’

  Facebook is cutting off ads in Russia. It’s pausing ads that target people in the country and is no longer letting advertisers in Russia “create or run ads anywhere in the world, including within Russia,” the company announced on Friday. The moves mark a big escalation of its actions against the country and could help prevent Russian misinformation tied to its invasion of Ukraine from appearing in Facebook ads.

• India Times ☛ The power of tech giants has made them as influential as nations. Here’s how they’re sanctioning Russia

  The world’s five leading tech companies – Google (now Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Microsoft – have taken steps to impose significant and (mainly) voluntary sanctions on Russia, in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

  But the decisions didn’t come unprompted. Ukraine has lobbied the major tech companies in the same way it sought assistance from the European Union, NATO and the US government.

  Facing the largest military action in Europe since the second world war, Ukraine appealed directly to big tech companies as though they were nation states. It’s a reminder that in today’s world, these giants are major players on the geopolitical stage.

• India Times ☛ Netflix, TikTok block services in Russia to avoid crackdown

  Netflix and TikTok suspended most of their services in Russia on Sunday as the government cracks down on what people and media outlets can say about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

  TikTok said Russian users of the popular social media app would no longer be able to post new videos or livestreams and they also wouldn’t be able to see videos shared from elsewhere in the world.

  Netflix said it was suspending its service in Russia but didn’t provide additional details.

• The Verge ☛ TikTok temporarily bans new video creation in Russia

  Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on the fake news law last week. It punishes people with fines or up to 15 years behind bars for spreading “false information” about Russia’s military or for publicly calling for sanctions on Russia. As Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, it has begun to crack down on social platforms and foreign media — Russia has put a block on Facebook, restricted access to Twitter, and has barred access to BBC news sites.

• The Hill ☛ Twitter bans accounts that promoted #IStandWithPutin for ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’

  Twitter has banned more than 100 accounts that repeatedly retweeted the #IStandWithPutin hashtag, which trended on the platform earlier this week amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

• NBC ☛ Twitter bans over 100 accounts that pushed #IStandWithPutin

  Twitter has banned more than 100 accounts that pushed the pro-Russian hashtag #IStandWithPutin for participating in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” days after the hashtag trended on Twitter amid the invasion in Ukraine.

  A Twitter spokesperson said on Friday that it is still investigating the origins and links between the accounts, and that it banned the accounts for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ Podcasts Are Hollywood’s Source Material Du Jour

  This trend also has been a boon for news media, which was historically cut out of the adaptation game. “We’re seeing our industry leverage podcasts more as the genesis of IP [sic] for development into film and television,” observes Agnes Chu, president of Condé Nast Entertainment. In 2020, Chu left Disney+ for the legendary publishing house, whose podcasts, like its print features in such titles as GQ and Vanity Fair, are now being pitched for adaptation. “Because we have a team of creative leaders across film, television and audio working with our editors early in the process, we’re together able to shepherd a concept through the entire ecosystem.”

• The Verge ☛ TikTok plans to add labels to ‘some’ state-controlled media

  TikTok has announced that it’ll start putting labels on videos from “some” state-controlled media outlets as it starts rolling out its new state media policy. According to a news post from the company, it is “expediting” its plans for piloting the policy due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company says it started working on the policy last year. Users can expect the labels to start appearing within the next few days, according to the post.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Hill ☛ More than 4,300 detained in Russia during anti-war demonstrations

  An independent protest monitoring group said that 4,366 Russian residents from 56 different cities had been detained, according to the news service, which added that Russia’s interior ministry said about 3,500 protesters had been detained. The ministry reportedly added that more than 5,200 residents participated in the demonstrations.

• ABC ☛ More than 4,300 arrested in Russia during protests against invasion of Ukraine

  Russian Police have detained more than 4,300 people during nationwide protests against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to an independent protest monitoring group.

  Thousands of protesters chanted “No to war!” and “Shame on you!”, according to videos of the events on Sunday posted on social media by opposition activists and bloggers.

• BBC ☛ Protests across Russia see thousands detained

  In the last 11 days, more than 10,000 people have been detained at protests, OVD-Info says.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Verge ☛ Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia

  Cogent Communications, an internet backbone provider that routes data across intercontinental connections, has cut ties with Russian customers over its invasion of Ukraine, as first reported by The Washington Post. The US-based company is one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers and serves customers in 50 countries, including a number of high-profile Russian companies.

  In a letter to Russian customers obtained by The Post, Cogent cited “economic sanctions” and “the increasingly uncertain security situation” as the motives behind its total shutdown in the country. Cogent similarly told The Verge that it “terminated its contracts” with Russian customers in compliance with the European Union’s move to ban Russian state-backed media outlets.

• AccessNow ☛ Letter to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission: withdraw the Regulation for Digital, Social Media, and OTT Platforms

  The undersigned organizations urge you to protect people’s rights and freedoms, and enable an open, free and secure internet in Bangladesh. The draft “Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission Regulation for Digital, Social Media and OTT Platforms” (Draft Regulations), published online on February 3, imperils people’s freedom of expression, and right to privacy, undermines encryption and weakens online safety. If enforced, the regulations will have a deleterious impact on human rights, and put journalists, dissidents, activists and vulnerable communities, in particular, at greater risk.

  The Draft Regulations seek to implement a content governance framework devoid of adequate judicial oversight, clarity and predictability, and integration of human rights and due process. The Draft Regulations are inconsistent with the international human rights framework, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Further, they contravene widely endorsed principles for content governance rooted in international human rights standards including the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability and the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation. Efforts by telecommunications regulators to change regulations to address concerns around “Over-the-Top” (OTT) services can have significant negative impacts on human rights as well as broader principles such as network neutrality, if done improperly.

  [...]

  In order to protect human rights and enable a free, open and secure internet, it is imperative for the BTRC to withdraw and reconsider the Draft Regulations. Further, sustained, meaningful and in-depth consultation with stakeholders is a prerequisite to the development of a rights-respecting framework. We urge the BTRC to engage in such a process prior to developing regulations for intermediaries and digital services that would impact people’s rights and freedoms, and indeed democracy itself.

• AccessNow ☛ Bangladesh’s proposed digital, social media, and OTT platforms regulation needs a complete overhaul

  Bangladesh’s oppressive draft Regulation for Digital, Social Media and OTT Platforms must be scrapped before it jeopardises people’s freedom of expression, right to privacy, and online safety.

  Access Now, representing an international coalition of 45 organisations, is urging the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) to immediately withdraw the draft regulation, and instead focus on ensuring access to an open, accessible, and secure internet in Bangladesh to all people.

  “Bangladesh’s current draft digital, social media, and OTT regulation doesn’t belong on the discussion table, it belongs in the bin”, said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Senior International Counsel and Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now. “The country’s proposed upheaval of digital rights would not only trample free speech, but risk people’s safety by obstructing encryption and increasing the risks to journalists, activists, and civil society actors — already at risk with existing flawed laws in Bangladesh.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The Verge ☛ Netflix shuts down its services in Russia

  Last week, Netflix said it wouldn’t comply with a new Russian law that requires large streamers to host 20 Russian propaganda channels, such as NTV and the state-backed Channel One. The streaming giant later announced that it’s halting all productions and acquisitions in Russia — Netflix had been working on four Russian originals at the time. According to Bloomberg, Netflix currently has around 1 million subscribers in Russia.

• Variety ☛ Netflix Suspends Service in Russia Amid Invasion of Ukraine

  Netflix has suspended its service in Russia to protest the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  Earlier this week, the streaming service had announced that it would pause all future projects and acquisitions from Russia, joining a growing list of companies that have cut ties with the country. Netflix had four Russian originals in the works, including a crime thriller series directed by Dasha Zhuk, which was shooting and has since been put on hold. Netflix also recently refused to carry 20 Russian free-to-air propaganda channels that it was required to host under Russian law.

  Now, the company is taking an additional step in shutting down its service entirely.

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ Netflix, TikTok Join Russian Boycott, Suspend Local Services

  Netflix and TikTok have joined the Russian boycott. The global streaming and the social media site on Sunday confirmed they had suspended their Russian services in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Monopolies

• Variety ☛ Why the FTC Faces an Uphill Battle in Challenging Amazon-MGM Deal

  The Federal Trade Commission’s scrutiny of Amazon’s alleged anticompetitive practices may soon crank up a notch.

  That’s according to The Information, which reported earlier this week that the FTC expects to decide within weeks on whether it will bring forth an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to challenge its planned purchase of MGM.

  The Information’s report adds a crucial potential milestone date on the timeline of the FTC’s investigations into Amazon. Last June, it was reported that the FTC would be investigating Amazon’s proposed deal to acquire MGM.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Russia Will Probably Legalize Some Software Piracy to Mitigate Sanctions

    With no signs that Vladimir Putin intends to stop his military campaign against Ukraine, there are hopes that sanctions will press the Russian president to stop the killing. However, Russia has plans to live under sanctions if necessary, which may include the legalization of some software piracy. There has also been a call to unblock the country’s largest torrent site.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ I2P: The Censorship Resistant Anonymous P2P Network is 20 Years Old

    I2P, short for the Invisible Internet Project, has recently turned twenty years old. Unlike other peer-to-peer technologies such as Tor and BitTorrent, I2P has mostly stayed under the radar among the public at large. Considering its name that’s perhaps fitting; however, its two-decade anniversary shouldn’t go unnoticed.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Open Minds Podcast: Angela DeBarger of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: March 6th, 2022

This has been a great week with lots of exciting news, starting with the Armbian 22.02 release that finally introduced support for Raspberry Pi 4 devices and Nitrux 2.0.1 which switches to Mesa 22.1 by default, and continuing with great app releases like the Getting Things GNOME 0.6 personal tasks and to-do lists app, digiKam 7.6 photo management app, a new KDE Gear 21.12 point release, and a first LibreOffice 7.3 point release that fixes a critical bug in Calc.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ A Mystery in Plain Sight | LINUX Unplugged 448

  We surprise each other with three different topics, hidden away by encryption in our show notes – we literally have no idea what we’re talking about this week.

• GNU World Order 450

• Josh Bressers: Episode 313 – Insecurity at scale

  Josh and Kurt talk about the challenges of security at scale. Specifically we focus on why a lot of security starts to fall apart once you have to do something more than a few times. There’s a lot of new thinking we need to push security forward.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • WCCF Tech ☛ AMD ROCm 5.0.2 launches with minor documentation updates & fixes

    AMD’s open-source team released the ROCm 5.0 driver with standard RDNA2 support about one month ago. A few days ago, the latest point release for the open-source AMD Radeon Open eCosystem compute AMD launched a stack update to add more documentation and fix the hostcall facility in the HIP runtime.

    AMD updates the ROCm 5.0 driver to fix a failing code and adds further information to the initial documentation for users

    AMD’s ROCm is an open software platform permitting researchers to access the power of AMD Instinct accelerators to propel scientific findings. The ROCm platform is built on open portability, supporting environments across multiple accelerator architectures and vendors.

Applications

• Vote for your favourite Inkscape About Screen for Inkscape 1.2 until March 13 2022! | Inkscape

  It’s time to vote for the About Screen for Inkscape’s version 1.2!

  We’re very proud to present you with an amazing gallery featuring 25
  entries, by 20 different Inkscape artists. Thank you so much to everyone
  who entered!

  Community voting opens on March 7 (0:00 UTC) and closes on March 13, 2022 (23:59:59 UTC).

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install PHP 8.0 on CentOS 9 Stream

  PHP 8.0 is major released from PHP 7 series with improvements and changes to the language, including many long-awaited additions by developers everywhere! This includes named arguments; union types. It also boasts improved JIT compilation tools which will help optimize your application code even further than before while increasing performance.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 8.0 on Centos 9 Stream by importing the EPEL 9 and REMI repositories. The tutorial will focus on installing the development kit extensions and some tips for Nginx and PHP-FPM using the command line terminal.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Tor Browser on CentOS 9 Stream

  Tor, also referred to as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that permits anonymous communication when using online services like web surfing. The Tor network directs the web traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to search out more ways to stay their information and activities anonymous or a minimum of as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years because it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

  The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Tor Browser on CentOS 9 Stream workstation desktop using the natively installed Flatpak manager or downloading the browser manually and how to install it manually with tips on registering the application icon.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Opera Browser on CentOS 9 Stream

  Opera is a freeware, cross-platform Internet web browser by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera offers a clean, modern browser that’s another to the opposite major players within the Browser race. Its famous Opera Turbo mode and renowned battery saving mode are the simplest amongst all known web browsers by quite a margin, together with a built-in VPN and far more.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser stable, beta, or developer (nightly) on CentOS 9 Stream Workstation by importing the official repository and GPG key, then how to update in the future or remove.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Budgie Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04

  Budgie is a desktop environment that currently uses GNOME technologies such as GTK (> 3.x) and is developed as well as by contributors from numerous communities such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu Budgie.

  Ubuntu Budgie is a community developed distribution, integrating the Budgie Desktop Environment with Ubuntu at its core. Whether you are using it on an old computer, or a powerful workstation.

  Ubuntu Budgie is operating system that is adaptable to any device, keeping them fast and usable.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install ionCube Loader for PHP in Ubuntu

  In this post you will learn How to Install ionCube Loader for PHP in Ubuntu

  ionCube is a PHP extension (module) introduced tools to protect the source code of software written using the PHP programming language from being viewed, changed, and run on unlicensed computers. The encoding technology grew out of earlier work on the PHP Accelerator project, and at first launch included an online encoding service where PHP scripts can be uploaded and an encoded version downloaded in return, and a command line tool for Linux soon after.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Enable HTTP2 in NGINX

  HTTP2 is the natural evolution of HTTP. Thanks to it, we will have an improvement in the speed of response due to its architecture that allows with a connection to make several requests and responses.

  Another interesting aspect of HTTP2 is that it eliminates the sending and receiving of redundant information. In addition to this, everything is done securely so that the Internet experience becomes more efficient.

  For these and more reasons is that many sysadmin and webmasters choose to enable this protocol in all their configurations. Today we will do the same using Nginx.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Flatpak is a tool for deploying and managing software packages on the Linux operating system. It provides an isolated environment where users can run applications without affecting other parts of their computers.

  With Flatpaks, installing an application is like pulling it into your local repository. Links have then generated that point from the right places in Filesystem to where you can find these files–these hard links will be efficient for disk space since they’re simple compared with doing things through traditional methods.

  Most Ubuntu LTS users know that the distribution focuses on stability over newer features, especially once the LTS has aged after its initial release with packages being frozen. For example, you may want to install the latest version of an application such as Discord, VLC, Spotify, or Ubuntu does not have the application together, making often third-party package managers use it as a backup.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish and enable Flathub to search, install, maintain or remove Flatpak applications as an alternative the standard APT package manager, Launchpad PPA’s and especially Snap packages from Snapcraft.io.

• Bash script: YES/NO prompt example

  Interactive Bash scripts will often include a yes or no prompt in order to ask for user verification before proceeding with a set of instructions or canceling the procedure.

  If a user answers yes to the prompt, the Bash script will typically proceed with its task, and if a user answers no, the script will either exit or move on to a different part of the script.

  In this tutorial, you will see how to create a yes/no prompt in a Bash script on a Linux system. See some of our examples below to learn how a yes/no prompt works.

• Bash Scripting: Read input from command line

  We can make a Bash script interactive by prompting a user for input. This can be done from the command line, with our script waiting for user input in order to proceed further.

  The principal way to do this is via the read command. Although it is also possible to read input in the form of command line arguments that are passed to the Bash script when it is executed.

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to read input from the command line with a Bash script and the read command.

• How to Change Hostname in Linux

  If it’s connected to the internet, your computer has an address. It’s like the street address for your house, but other computers just use a series of numbers.

  To make it easier for us humans to remember, we also assign a hostname using words. If the need arises, here is how to change hostname in Linux.

• How to Open/Allow incoming firewall port on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

  The default firewall on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish is ufw, which is short for “uncomplicated firewall.” When enabled, the firewall will block all incoming connections by default.

  If you want to allow an incoming connection through ufw, you will have to create a new rule to allow a certain port or multiple ports. We can also specify that only connections from a certain IP address or network range can gain incoming access, while blocking all others. This is all done from the command line and is quite simple once you know the proper syntax.

  The objective of this tutorial is to serve as a quick reference guide on how to allow incoming traffic on any TCP or UDP port using Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux with UFW firewall.

• How to configure Samba Server share on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  File servers often need to accommodate a variety of different client systems. Running Samba on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish allows Windows systems to connect and access files, as well as other Linux systems and MacOS. An alternative solution would be to run an FTP/SFTP server on Ubuntu 22.04, which can also support the connections from many systems.

  The objective of this tutorial is to configure a basic Samba server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish to share user home directories as well as provide read-write anonymous access to selected directory.

  There are myriads of possible other Samba configurations, however the aim of this guide is to get you started with some basics which can be later expanded to implement more features to suit your needs. You will also learn how to access the Ubuntu 22.04 Samba server from a Windows system.

• How to install GCC the C compiler on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  The objective of this tutorial is to install GCC, the C compiler, on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

  GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system developed to support various programming languages. It is a standard compiler used in most projects related to GNU and Linux, for example, the Linux kernel.

  Installation of GCC can be achieved by using the apt install command as you will see below.

• How to manage EFI boot manager entries on Linux

  UEFI is the firmware interface which on modern machines has superseded the legacy BIOS. One of the features of the UEFI firmware is being able to store boot entries in the persistent and editable NVRAM memory (Non Volatile RAM). While installing a Linux distribution (or any other operating system) in UEFI mode makes usually the related boot entry to be written to the NVRAM, in some cases we may want to perform manual operations such as modifying the boot order, creating or deleting a boot entry.

  To accomplish such tasks on Linux we can use the efibootmgr utility. In this tutorial we see how to install it on some of the most used Linux distributions, and how to use it to manage NVRAM boot entries.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install FileRun on Ubuntu 20.04

  Today you will learn How To Install FileRun on Ubuntu 20.04

  FileRun is a self-hosted Google Drive alternative. It is a full featured web based file manager with an easy to use user interface. It is great for managing your photo, movie, audio collection, or sharing files with your family and friends.

  FileRun is a reliable and performant File management desktop sync and file sharing

  It runs great on any server, including hosting accounts or small devices like Raspberry PiAccess your files from anywhere (desktop, mobile app or browser).

• UNIX Cop ☛ Osquery integration with Wazuh

  osquery is an operating system instrumentation framework for Windows, OS X (macOS), Linux, and FreeBSD. The tools make low-level operating system analytics and monitoring both performant and intuitive.

  osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: XeroLinux in 2022

    XeroLinux is a distribution based on Arch Linux with a focus on eye candy. The distribution is available in three editions: Main (which runs the KDE Plasma desktop), GNOME, and Xfce. Each edition is available for 64-bit (x86_64) machines exclusively.

    I couldn’t find a whole lot of other useful information about XeroLinux from its website or forum, other than it uses the Calamares system installer, requires a network connection during the install process, and the project appears to be the work of a single developer who is not interested in fielding support requests from Wayland users: “I have finally added KDE Wayland Session to ISO, enabling you to use it. But it’s not all roses, yet. Especially if you are an NVIDIA owner like I am. Yes, if you are, then you are either out of luck, since NVIDIA did not yet bake the required modules into the driver yet, so you will have to do some tinkering to get it to work. If you do not feel comfortable or confident enough to do it then just use Xorg (X11) to log in and skip Wayland for now… Kindly note, that I will not be providing support in that area since, I am not yet confident in using it.”

    The latest version appears to have been released on January 3rd of 2022, though the project doesn’t offer any version information attached to its ISO files. I downloaded the Main/KDE edition which is 2.7GB in size.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • GNU ☛ Unifont – News: Unifont 14.0.02 Released [Savannah]

      Unifont 14.0.02 is now available. This release makes modifications to several glyphs in Plane 0 and Plane 1. It is a stable release.

• Programming/Development

  • Python

    • Linux Hint ☛ Python Inline If-Else

      Python programming language is readable and efficient in writing operations. In this article, the discussion is on inline if-else conditional statements. Python doesn’t have a ternary operator, so we use if-else in a single line that has the same effects as ternary operators. This condition evaluates conditions in a state of being true or false.

      As inline if-else statements are logical statements that offer a single line that preserves code quality by replacing the multiple lines of if-else code. Inline if-else statements should be used with the expressions and their execution based on the evaluation conditions.

  • Java

    • Linux Hint ☛ Inheritance in Java | Explained

      Object-oriented Java programming provides a concept of inheritance that makes it possible for a class to inherit the class attributes and methods of other classes. The class that inherits the characteristics of some other class is referred as a child/derived/sub-class, while the class whose characteristics are inherited is referred as a parent/base/super-class.